Analysis of email traffic suggests remote work may stifle innovation

The debate over what is lost when remote work replaces an in-person workplace just got an infusion of much-needed data. According to a study conducted at MIT, when workers go remote, the types of work relationships that encourage innovation tend to be hard hit.

Two and a half years after Covid-19 shut down offices and research labs around the world, “we can finally use data to address a critical question: How did the pandemic-induced adoption of remote working affect our creativity and innovation on the job?” says Carlo Ratti, professor of the practice of urban technology and planning and director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab. “Until now, we could only guess. Today we can finally start to put real data behind those hypotheses.”

The MIT researchers, with colleagues at Texas A&M University, Italian National Research Council, Technical University of Denmark, and Oxford University, analyzed aspects of a de-identified email network comprising 2,834 MIT research staff, faculty, and postdoctoral researchers, for 18 months starting in December 2019. All of the emails were anonymized and examined to analyze the network structure of their origins and destinations, not their content.

Toward late March 2019, the Covid pandemic abruptly ended much of the on-site research on MIT’s campus. With the shift to remote work, the new study shows, email communications between different research units fell off, leading to a decrease in what researchers call the “weak ties” that undergird the exchange of new ideas that tend to foster innovation.

Weak ties were defined as any connection between two people who had no mutual contact in the email network. In other words, two people, A and B, formed a weak tie if there was no third person C that both of them also contacted. “Strong ties,” on the other hand, which are the type of communication that tends to expose us to the same ideas repeatedly, increased. Over the course of the lockdown, the researchers found that “ego networks,” referring to an individual's unique web of connections, became more stagnant, with contacts becoming more similar each week.

The study was published in the August 22 issue of Nature Computational Science.

The researchers hypothesized that physical proximity should play a role in the development of weak ties. As such, weak ties between researchers in physically distant labs, who would be unlikely to encounter each other by chance even when working on campus, should not have dropped significantly when workers went remote. The data turned out to support that hypothesis, the team reports.

“Our research shows that co-location is a crucial factor to foster weak ties,” says Paolo Santi, researcher at MIT’s Senseable City Lab and at the Italian National Research Council. “Our data showed that weak ties evaporated at MIT starting on March 23, 2020, with a 38 percent drop,” he says. Over the next 18 months, the drop translated into an estimated cumulative loss of more than 5,100 new weak ties.

The idea that “weak ties” are conducive to innovation dates back to research published in 1973 by sociologist Mark Granovetter, who wrote that “an initially unpopular innovation spread by those with few weak ties is more likely to be confined to a few cliques. … Individuals with many weak ties are, by my arguments, best placed to diffuse such a difficult innovation.” Granovetter’s research was “just the beginning of a vast literature in sociology, which has subsequently confirmed and substantiated his ideas,” Ratti says.

In an accompanying commentary article in Nature Computational Science, John Meluso of the University of Vermont calls the “weak ties” idea “one of the oldest theories in social networks,” while pointing out that what generates and maintains the ties has remained vague. He notes that the new study’s computational techniques shed light on the causal mechanism of “propinquity,” the idea that proximity increases the odds of creating new connections and strengthening existing ones.

The researchers investigated not only the abrupt decline in weak ties when the MIT campus was shut down, but also the transition when researchers began returning to campus on July 15, 2021. A partial reinstatement of weak ties occurred after that point, the team found. With these findings, the researchers created a model that predicted that a complete return to the workplace would result in a “complete recovery of weak ties.”

Ratti and his colleagues suggest that as companies and organizations refine their post-lockdown remote work policies, they should try to find ways to encourage serendipitous interactions across departments and research units to foster the spread of new and diverse information. As Ratti explains, those interactions create exposure for those involved to “a diverse set of people and ideas.” At the same time, the study authors acknowledged that remote or hybrid work offers advantages to individuals, especially in terms of flexibility.

“Employers would make a mistake in discarding the newfound flexibility of the Covid years,” Ratti says. “Our study hints at the fact that establishing a work balance trade-off by combining in-person and remote interactions among colleagues seems to be the optimal solution, which could inform the transition to a hybrid, post-Covid-19 ‘new normal.’”

Achieving that balance could involve modeling the minimum amount of in-person work needed to keep weak ties activated. It could also involve transforming traditional office floor plans designed for individual tasks into “more open, dynamic spaces that encourage the so-called cafeteria effect,” in which people from diverse groups sit and converse together, or event-based spaces for different communities to converge, Ratti says.

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Chloé Gentgen named one of Aviation Week Network’s “20 Twenties”

Aviation Week Network named Chloé Gentgen SM’22, a PhD candidate in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), as one of this year’s 20 Twenties Award recipients. The program has selected 20 promising recipients each year since 2013, based on stellar academic performance, extensive community involvement, and substantial research contributions, to recognize the next generation of top aerospace talents.

“I am incredibly thankful to be honored with this award,” says Gentgen. “I see it as encouragement to continue working on the future of space exploration, and in turn to encourage others to follow similar paths into aerospace engineering.”

Gentgen, a research assistant in the Engineering Systems Lab at MIT, is one of 20 winners selected from a competitive pool of 82 nominees representing 36 different colleges and universities from around the world this year. Her research focuses on space systems engineering, mission architecture, space propulsion, and multidisciplinary optimization.

Her master’s work involved studying tradespace exploration and design optimization of propulsion systems for small satellites. Since coming to MIT, Gentgen has also been involved in multiple mission architecture projects, including two NASA RASC-AL competitions — with her team winning first place this year — and the Caltech Space Challenge.

In addition to research, Gentgen is involved with the Graduate Women in Aerospace Engineering student group at MIT, where she previously was co-president and led the professional development committee. Gentgen also helps organize department-wide space seminars featuring prominent speakers.

This summer, Gentgen is interning at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she is working on a mission proposal to explore Saturn's Moon Enceladus. Prior to MIT, Gentgen received both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from Ecole Centrale Paris, Paris-Saclay University in France.

“I’m thrilled to see Chloé recognized with this prestigious award for her technical knowledge, her passion for planetary exploration, and for her impressive leadership of her peers,” says Olivier de Weck, Apollo Program Professor and professor of astronautics and engineering systems in AeroAstro, who is Gentgen’s advisor. “Chloé is an excellent student who brings energy, enthusiasm, and a unique global perspective as an international student. Her professors, classmates, and staff benefit enormously from her vision and passion for aerospace and planetary exploration.”

The 20 Twenties program, a collaboration with Accenture and sponsored by Hexcel, is a part of Aviation Week Network’s workforce initiative that cultivates, informs, and inspires the next generation of aerospace and defense professionals. In November, the winners are invited to attend the 20 Twenties Awards Luncheon and then honored that same day during Aviation Week Network’s 65th Annual Laureate Awards and Dinner at the National Building Museum in Washington.

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A simple way to significantly increase lifetimes of fuel cells and other devices

In research that could jump-start work on a range of technologies including fuel cells, which are key to storing solar and wind energy, MIT researchers have found a relatively simple way to increase the lifetimes of these devices: changing the pH of the system.

Fuel and electrolysis cells made of materials known as solid metal oxides are of interest for several reasons. For example, in the electrolysis mode, they are very efficient at converting electricity from a renewable source into a storable fuel like hydrogen or methane that can be used in the fuel cell mode to generate electricity when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. They can also be made without using costly metals like platinum. However, their commercial viability has been hampered, in part, because they degrade over time. Metal atoms seeping from the interconnects used to construct banks of fuel/electrolysis cells slowly poison the devices.

“What we’ve been able to demonstrate is that we can not only reverse that degradation, but actually enhance the performance above the initial value by controlling the acidity of the air-electrode interface,” says Harry L. Tuller, the R.P. Simmons Professor of Ceramics and Electronic Materials in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE).

The research, initially funded by the U.S. Department of Energy through the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management’s (FECM) National Energy Technology Laboratory, should help the department meet its goal of significantly cutting the degradation rate of solid oxide fuel cells by 2035 to 2050.

“Extending the lifetime of solid oxide fuels cells helps deliver the low-cost, high-efficiency hydrogen production and power generation needed for a clean energy future,” says Robert Schrecengost, acting director of FECM’s Division of Hydrogen with Carbon Management. “The department applauds these advancements to mature and ultimately commercialize these technologies so that we can provide clean and reliable energy for the American people.”

“I’ve been working in this area my whole professional life, and what I’ve seen until now is mostly incremental improvements,” says Tuller, who was recently named a 2022 Materials Research Society Fellow for his career-long work in solid-state chemistry and electrochemistry. “People are normally satisfied with seeing improvements by factors of tens-of-percent. So, actually seeing much larger improvements and, as importantly, identifying the source of the problem and the means to work around it, issues that we’ve been struggling with for all these decades, is remarkable.”

Says James M. LeBeau, the John Chipman Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, who was also involved in the research, “This work is important because it could overcome [some] of the limitations that have prevented the widespread use of solid oxide fuel cells. Additionally, the basic concept can be applied to many other materials used for applications in the energy-related field.”

A report describing the work was reported Aug. 11, in Energy & Environmental Science. Additional authors of the paper are Han Gil Seo, a DMSE postdoc; Anna Staerz, formerly a DMSE postdoc, now at Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (IMEC) Belgium and soon to join the Colorado School of Mines faculty; Dennis S. Kim, a DMSE postdoc; Dino Klotz, a DMSE visiting scientist, now at Zurich Instruments; Michael Xu, a DMSE graduate student; and Clement Nicollet, formerly a DMSE postdoc, now at the Université de Nantes. Seo and Staerz contributed equally to the work.

Changing the acidity

A fuel/electrolysis cell has three principal parts: two electrodes (a cathode and anode) separated by an electrolyte. In the electrolysis mode, electricity from, say, the wind, can be used to generate storable fuel like methane or hydrogen. On the other hand, in the reverse fuel cell reaction, that storable fuel can be used to create electricity when the wind isn’t blowing.

A working fuel/electrolysis cell is composed of many individual cells that are stacked together and connected by steel metal interconnects that include the element chrome to keep the metal from oxidizing. But “it turns out that at the high temperatures that these cells run, some of that chrome evaporates and migrates to the interface between the cathode and the electrolyte, poisoning the oxygen incorporation reaction,” Tuller says. After a certain point, the efficiency of the cell has dropped to a point where it is not worth operating any longer.

“So if you can extend the life of the fuel/electrolysis cell by slowing down this process, or ideally reversing it, you could go a long way towards making it practical,” Tuller says.

The team showed that you can do both by controlling the acidity of the cathode surface. They also explained what is happening.

To achieve their results, the team coated the fuel/electrolysis cell cathode with lithium oxide, a compound that changes the relative acidity of the surface from being acidic to being more basic. “After adding a small amount of lithium, we were able to recover the initial performance of a poisoned cell,” Tuller says. When the engineers added even more lithium, the performance improved far beyond the initial value. “We saw improvements of three to four orders of magnitude in the key oxygen reduction reaction rate and attribute the change to populating the surface of the electrode with electrons needed to drive the oxygen incorporation reaction.”

The engineers went on to explain what is happening by observing the material at the nanoscale, or billionths of a meter, with state-of-the-art transmission electron microscopy and electron energy loss spectroscopy. “We were interested in understanding the distribution of the different chemical additives [chromium and lithium oxide] on the surface,” says LeBeau.

They found that the lithium oxide effectively dissolves the chromium to form a glassy material that no longer serves to degrade the cathode performance.

Applications for sensors, catalysts, and more

Many technologies like fuel cells are based on the ability of the oxide solids to rapidly breathe oxygen in and out of their crystalline structures, Tuller says. The MIT work essentially shows how to recover — and speed up — that ability by changing the surface acidity. As a result, the engineers are optimistic that the work could be applied to other technologies including, for example, sensors, catalysts, and oxygen permeation-based reactors.

The team is also exploring the effect of acidity on systems poisoned by different elements, like silica.

Concludes Tuller: “As is often the case in science, you stumble across something and notice an important trend that was not appreciated previously. Then you test that concept further, and you discover that it is really very fundamental.”

In addition to the DOE, this work was also funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea, the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering via Tuller’s appointment as the R.P. Simmons Professor of Ceramics and Electronic Materials, and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

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MIT’s MOXIE experiment reliably produces oxygen on Mars

On the red and dusty surface of Mars, nearly 100 million miles from Earth, an instrument the size of a lunchbox is proving it can reliably do the work of a small tree.  

The MIT-led Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE, has been successfully making oxygen from the Red Planet’s carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere since February 2021, when it touched down on the Martian surface as part of NASA’s Perseverance rover mission.

In a study published today in the journal Science Advances, researchers report that, by the end of 2021, MOXIE was able to produce oxygen on seven experimental runs, in a variety of atmospheric conditions, including during the day and night, and through different Martian seasons. In each run, the instrument reached its target of producing six grams of oxygen per hour — about the rate of a modest tree on Earth.

Researchers envision that a scaled-up version of MOXIE could be sent to Mars ahead of a human mission, to continuously produce oxygen at the rate of several hundred trees. At that capacity, the system should generate enough oxygen to both sustain humans once they arrive, and fuel a rocket for returning astronauts back to Earth.

So far, MOXIE’s steady output is a promising first step toward that goal.

“We have learned a tremendous amount that will inform future systems at a larger scale,” says Michael Hecht, principal investigator of the MOXIE mission at MIT’s Haystack Observatory.

MOXIE’s oxygen production on Mars also represents the first demonstration of “in-situ resource utilization,” which is the idea of harvesting and using a planet’s materials (in this case, carbon dioxide on Mars) to make resources (such as oxygen) that would otherwise have to be transported from Earth.

“This is the first demonstration of actually using resources on the surface of another planetary body, and transforming them chemically into something that would be useful for a human mission,” says MOXIE deputy principal investigator Jeffrey Hoffman, a professor of the practice in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “It’s historic in that sense.”

Hoffman and Hecht’s MIT co-authors include MOXIE team members Jason SooHoo, Andrew Liu, Eric Hinterman, Maya Nasr, Shravan Hariharan, and Kyle Horn, along with collaborators from multiple institutions including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which managed MOXIE’s development, flight software, packaging, and testing prior to launch.  

Seasonal air

The current version of MOXIE is small by design, in order to fit aboard the Perseverance rover, and is built to run for short periods, starting up and shutting down with each run, depending on the rover’s exploration schedule and mission responsibilities. In contrast, a full-scale oxygen factory would include larger units that would ideally run continuously.

Despite the necessary compromises in MOXIE’s current design, the instrument has shown it can reliably and efficiently convert Mars’ atmosphere into pure oxygen. It does so by first drawing the Martian air in through a filter that cleans it of contaminants. The air is then pressurized, and sent through the Solid OXide Electrolyzer (SOXE), an instrument developed and built by OxEon Energy, that electrochemically splits the carbon dioxide-rich air into oxygen ions and carbon monoxide.

The oxygen ions are then isolated and recombined to form breathable, molecular oxygen, or O₂, which MOXIE then measures for quantity and purity before releasing it harmlessly back into the air, along with carbon monoxide and other atmospheric gases.

Since the rover’s landing in February 2021, MOXIE engineers have started up the instrument seven times throughout the Martian year, each time taking a few hours to warm up, then another hour to make oxygen before powering back down. Each run was scheduled for a different time of day or night, and in different seasons, to see whether MOXIE could accommodate shifts in the planet’s atmospheric conditions.

“The atmosphere of Mars is far more variable than Earth,” Hoffman notes. “The density of the air can vary by a factor of two through the year, and the temperature can vary by 100 degrees. One objective is to show we can run in all seasons.”

So far, MOXIE has shown that it can make oxygen at almost any time of the Martian day and year.

“The only thing we have not demonstrated is running at dawn or dusk, when the temperature is changing substantially,” Hecht says. “We do have an ace up our sleeve that will let us do that, and once we test that in the lab, we can reach that last milestone to show we can really run any time.”

Ahead of the game

As MOXIE continues to churn out oxygen on Mars, engineers plan to push its capacity, and increase its production, particularly in the Martian spring, when atmospheric density and carbon dioxide levels are high.

“The next run coming up will be during the highest density of the year, and we just want to make as much oxygen as we can,” Hecht says. “So we’ll set everything as high as we dare, and let it run as long as we can.”

They will also monitor the system for signs of wear and tear. As MOXIE is just one experiment among several aboard the Perseverance rover, it cannot run continuously as a full-scale system would. Instead, the instrument must start up and shut down with each run — a thermal stress that can degrade the system over time.

If MOXIE can operate successfully despite repeatedly turning on and off, this would suggest that a full-scale system, designed to run continuously, could do so for thousands of hours.

“To support a human mission to Mars, we have to bring a lot of stuff from Earth, like computers, spacesuits, and habitats,” Hoffman says. “But dumb old oxygen? If you can make it there, go for it — you’re way ahead of the game.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

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How the brain generates rhythmic behavior

Many of our bodily functions, such as walking, breathing, and chewing, are controlled by brain circuits called central oscillators, which generate rhythmic firing patterns that regulate these behaviors.

MIT neuroscientists have now discovered the neuronal identity and mechanism underlying one of these circuits: an oscillator that controls the rhythmic back-and-forth sweeping of tactile whiskers, or whisking, in mice. This is the first time that any such oscillator has been fully characterized in mammals.

The MIT team found that the whisking oscillator consists of a population of inhibitory neurons in the brainstem that fires rhythmic bursts during whisking. As each neuron fires, it also inhibits some of the other neurons in the network, allowing the overall population to generate a synchronous rhythm that retracts the whiskers from their protracted positions.

“We have defined a mammalian oscillator molecularly, electrophysiologically, functionally, and mechanistically,” says Fan Wang, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “It’s very exciting to see a clearly defined circuit and mechanism of how rhythm is generated in a mammal.”

Wang is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature. The lead authors of the paper are MIT research scientists Jun Takatoh and Vincent Prevosto.

Rhythmic behavior

Most of the research that clearly identified central oscillator circuits has been done in invertebrates. For example, Eve Marder’s lab at Brandeis University found cells in the stomatogastric ganglion in lobsters and crabs that generate oscillatory activity to control rhythmic motion of the digestive tract.

Characterizing oscillators in mammals, especially in awake behaving animals, has proven to be highly challenging. The oscillator that controls walking is believed to be distributed throughout the spinal cord, making it difficult to precisely identify the neurons and circuits involved. The oscillator that generates rhythmic breathing is located in a part of the brain stem called the pre-Bötzinger complex, but the exact identity of the oscillator neurons is not fully understood.

“There haven’t been detailed studies in awake behaving animals, where one can record from molecularly identified oscillator cells and manipulate them in a precise way,” Wang says.

Whisking is a prominent rhythmic exploratory behavior in many mammals, which use their tactile whiskers to detect objects and sense textures. In mice, whiskers extend and retract at a frequency of about 12 cycles per second. Several years ago, Wang’s lab set out try to identify the cells and the mechanism that control this oscillation.

To find the location of the whisking oscillator, the researchers traced back from the motor neurons that innervate whisker muscles. Using a modified rabies virus that infects axons, the researchers were able to label a group of cells presynaptic to these motor neurons in a part of the brainstem called the vibrissa intermediate reticular nucleus (vIRt). This finding was consistent with previous studies showing that damage to this part of the brain eliminates whisking.

The researchers then found that about half of these vIRt neurons express a protein called parvalbumin, and that this subpopulation of cells drives the rhythmic motion of the whiskers. When these neurons are silenced, whisking activity is abolished.

Next, the researchers recorded electrical activity from these parvalbumin-expressing vIRt neurons in brainstem in awake mice, a technically challenging task, and found that these neurons indeed have bursts of activity only during the whisker retraction period. Because these neurons provide inhibitory synaptic inputs to whisker motor neurons, it follows that rhythmic whisking is generated by a constant motor neuron protraction signal interrupted by the rhythmic retraction signal from these oscillator cells.

“That was a super satisfying and rewarding moment, to see that these cells are indeed the oscillator cells, because they fire rhythmically, they fire in the retraction phase, and they're inhibitory neurons,” Wang says.

“New principles”

The oscillatory bursting pattern of vIRt cells is initiated at the start of whisking. When the whiskers are not moving, these neurons fire continuously. When the researchers blocked vIRt neurons from inhibiting each other, the rhythm disappeared, and instead the oscillator neurons simply increased their rate of continuous firing.

This type of network, known as recurrent inhibitory network, differs from the types of oscillators that have been seen in the stomatogastric neurons in lobsters, in which neurons intrinsically generate their own rhythm.

“Now we have found a mammalian network oscillator that is formed by all inhibitory neurons,” Wang says.

The MIT scientists also collaborated with a team of theorists led by David Golomb at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, and David Kleinfeld at the University of California at San Diego. The theorists created a detailed computational model outlining how whisking is controlled, which fits well with all experimental data. A paper describing that model is appearing in an upcoming issue of Neuron.

Wang’s lab now plans to investigate other types of oscillatory circuits in mice, including those that control chewing and licking.

“We are very excited to find oscillators of these feeding behaviors and compare and contrast to the whisking oscillator, because they are all in the brain stem, and we want to know whether there's some common theme or if there are many different ways to generate oscillators,” she says.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

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3 Questions: Thea Keith-Lucas on ministering to the MIT community

MIT Chaplain to the Institute Thea Keith-Lucas feels very much at home working on a college campus. Keith-Lucas grew up in Sewanee, Tennessee, on the campus of the University of the South, where her father taught.

Keith-Lucas served as MIT’s Episcopal chaplain from 2013 to 2020, and was recently promoted to chaplain to the Institute and associate dean of the Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life (ORSEL), roles that she had been filling on an interim basis since September 2020. Before arriving at MIT, Keith-Lucas worked at a parish in Randolph, Massachusetts, with a diverse congregation comprising white, Afro-Caribbean, and Nigerian families. She later worked as the rector of a church in Danvers, Massachusetts. She holds a master’s degree in theology from the Harvard Divinity School and was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 2006. In her free time, Keith-Lucas likes to hike, go camping, and play board games with her husband and two children.

On Sept. 13 Keith-Lucas will be installed in an official ceremony to take place at 4 p.m. in the MIT Chapel (Building W15), with remarks from President L. Rafael Reif, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, and Vice Chancellor and Dean for Student Life Suzy Nelson. A reception will follow at 5 p.m. in the Kresge Oval. In this interview, she speaks on her priorities as chaplain to the Institute and on the joys of being a part of the MIT community.

Q: You’ve been at MIT for nine years, the last two of which were as interim chaplain to the Institute. What do you like most about working with the community and what surprises you the most?

A: I think the surprising thing is that, if there's any kind of human being that exists, you will eventually meet someone here at MIT who fits that category. I think when I started here, I thought, "Oh, religious life has such incredible breadth at MIT." We have a Baháʼí chaplain and Zoroastrian chaplain, and I get to learn from them, and that's amazing. And then the longer I'm here, the more I discovered that there are folks among us from traditions that we don't have a chaplain for. We have folks who are Sikh, Coptic Christian, and others who practice African traditional religions. So that keeps my job interesting. It's a constantly unfolding challenge to figure out how to serve all the folks who are in our community.

I think the essential quality of MIT people is curiosity. So, I find it delightful. I recently talked with a grad student who told me about the research they were doing to help cure arthritis. It was fascinating. I think that happens every week. You meet somebody and whether it's their research or something they do for fun, there's something that they're deeply curious about and very willing to tell you about. There are just these constant learning opportunities. 

I think curiosity is also a way that people here are really welcoming. I've found folks curious about me; students who don't have a grounding in any religious tradition just ask, "What does a chaplain do, anyway?"

That spark of curiosity I think is really important. I think it's healthy, too. When difficult things happen, when there's something we're struggling with personally or a system that's hard to navigate, stopping and asking more questions is just a great strategy, and I think it comes pretty naturally here.

Q: What are your top three goals for the coming academic year?

A: We're the Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life, and having those three guideposts helps me organize my thinking every year. I think we've made some good progress connecting the work we do around religious diversity with the work our colleagues do around the Institute around inclusion and justice and belonging more broadly. I just want to keep strengthening those connections, deepening those conversations. Last year, we held joint programs with the Institute Community and Equity Office celebrating our Jewish and Muslim communities on campus, and I would love to keep doing programs like that and broaden it to some of our other communities.

In spiritual life, we have a partnership we're working on with Physical Education and Wellness to create a new course focused on social connection. The MIT Reads book this year is “Together,” by Vivek Murthy. We’re joining that effort through this course, which dives into the research on how human beings connect and then uses that to help students map their social worlds and make their own plans for how they want to improve their social lives and their communities.

In ethical life, we have a long-standing program called Radius, which focuses on promoting ethical reflection, particularly about issues in science and technology. This is a great time to reintroduce Radius to the campus and to invite more folks into conversation and community around our ethical values.

Q: MIT students are known for having very busy schedules — with classes, work, research, and outside activities. How do you get them engaged with the spiritual community? What do you hope our students take away from their experience of religious life at MIT?

A: I have a demonstration that I've done for students with exactly this question, and it starts with a jar, an apple, and a bunch of pebbles. If you put all the pebbles in the jar first, then there's just a narrow band of space at the top and you can't stick the apple in the jar. But, if you put the apple in first and then pour in the pebbles, everything fits perfectly. And there's a basic principle there that you want to put your big item in first so that there's room for it and then you fit the other stuff around it.

We try to remind folks that spirituality, whether you're religious or not, is about getting to know who you are in your deepest self and your truest self and then connecting from that place, whether it's to other people or the natural world or, for some people, to an experience of a higher power. Spirituality is the sweetness of life, like the sweetness of that apple. It's a really big part of you and it doesn't make sense for that to go in your life last, as an afterthought. 

Anyone can try a spiritual practice, which could be as simple as meditation or taking a walk outside or taking time to have a real conversation with somebody about things that matter to you. Then, when we feel grounded in our values and connected to our best selves, it’s easier to do everything else. 

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“You are here because you belong here”

On Monday morning, a bright sun and blue sky accented a warm greeting by President L. Rafael Reif to the newest members of MIT — the Class of 2026 — who gathered with their families under a large and airy tent on Kresge Oval for Convocation, the Institute’s annual welcome to the incoming class.

This year’s first-years at MIT comprise 1,139 students, who have come from 50 states, 65 countries, and more than 900 high schools. The incoming class was selected out of a total of 33,796 applicants — a record high that is also 2 percent higher than the number of students who applied to MIT the previous year. The Class of 2026 is also notable in that it will be the last one Reif addresses at Convocation, as he will step down as president at the end of this year.

“This event is one of the gatherings that I will miss most,” said Reif, who welcomed first-years with a story of his own first year at MIT, when he was an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science in 1980. The native of Caracas, Venezuela, arrived on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus, painfully aware of his accent, unaccustomed to the cold New England winters, and anxious about whether he “had what it took to succeed.”

Those anxieties quickly ebbed, as Reif discovered a community of students, faculty, and staff “who were a lot like me — they loved to ask questions, they were intense, passionate, they loved to tinker, many of them came from somewhere else, and they cared about helping each other and helping society. That was the MIT I found when I arrived, and I am proud to say this is still the MIT I know today.”

To the first-years finding their way at MIT, Reif acknowledged that the experience can be overwhelming and filled with moments of equal parts success and doubt. He urged students to see the latter as a sign of growth.

“Very often those doubts come up when you are trying something new, or pushing yourself, or watching others with more experience,” Reif said. “Please remember: If you have doubts about yourself, it’s just a sign that you are learning.”

Above all, he assured the incoming class: “You are here because you belong here.”

“We believe in you”

As he closed his remarks, Reif briefly introduced incoming students to three members of MIT’s senior academic leadership who are focused on helping students grow and thrive: Provost Cynthia Barnhart, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, and Vice Chancellor and Dean for Student Life Suzy Nelson. He encouraged students to reach out to these leaders and their offices, as well as to friends, faculty, and others in the MIT community for support.

“All of us are dedicated to your success, and we believe in you,” Reif said. “If you need help, please ask. Everybody, and I mean everybody, needs help sometimes.”

For firsthand perspectives on life and work at MIT, Reif turned to three members of the MIT faculty who also are graduates of the Institute: Deb Roy SM ’95, PhD ’99, professor of media arts and sciences and director of the Center for Constructive Communication; Laura Kiessling ’83, the Novartis Professor of Chemistry; and Bryan Bryson ’07, PD ’13, PhD ’13, associate professor of biological engineering. Each faculty member took the incoming class through their own MIT experience.

A noble purpose

For his part, Roy advised first-years to “stay true to your inner child and the passions that brought you here.”

As a kid himself, Roy remembers having always been drawn to “the magical world of electricity and electronics, and eventually computers,” particularly after one frustrating week of failed experiments when he was finally able to make his “home-brewed electromagnetic buzzer finally jolt to life” — a moment that made his mother jump first with alarm, then joy at his success.

“Years later, when I joined MIT as a graduate student in the Media Lab, I found a home for my inner child,” Roy recalled. “I discovered across MIT, a place full of brilliant, playful people who shared my sense of wonder of how the world works, and also a desire to imagine how the world can be improved and made a better place.”

He encouraged students to reach out to others, particularly those who share a common passion. He also urged them to connect their passion to a “noble purpose” — a goal that Roy himself has worked toward in recent years. His research in artificial intelligence and machine learning has contributed to the development of global social media platforms in use today.

“Over the years I started to worry about some of the harms of social media,” he said. “This led me to become convinced that we need to fundamentally rethink how we communicate, and the role technology plays, for the sake of our democracy.”

His research group is now developing communications systems that are designed “for listening and bridging divides.”

“I can’t help but express how important each one of you will be to our future,” Roy said. “Our world is being challenged in fundamental ways: our climate, democracies, economic injustices, our understanding of others, all urgently need attention, energy, and fresh thinking.”

“Let yourself fail”

For Laura Kiessling, who attended MIT as an undergraduate, this week’s Convocation brought her back to her own first-year orientation. Though she doesn’t recall much of what was said, she remembers the feeling all too well — a worry of whether MIT made the right choice in choosing her.

“Yes, I had a solid case of imposter syndrome,” she said to an appreciative rumble from the crowd.

“Many of us experience imposter syndrome, and it takes different forms,” she went on, noting that some may express this stress by silently agonizing, while others “will just sign up for a million of the most advanced classes that they can. Neither of these is the best way to proceed.”

Instead, she suggested that students dive into a few new and different areas to stimulate their creativity beyond the “classical” achievements of p-sets and exams. Taking on a UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program), where a student can join and contribute to an active research lab on campus, is one way Kiessling recommended to stretch a student’s experience and perspective.

She also urged students to “go ahead and let yourself fail — that’s how we grow.” Kiessling lived this piece of advice firsthand when, as a student taking an advanced chemistry course at MIT, she happened to miss two classes in a row — one when the professor announced there would be an exam, and the next, when the exam was actually given.

“I begged the T.A. to take the exam … and I failed it,” she said. She would have dropped the class, but for the fact that she loved it. So she kept at it, and came away with certain key ideas that eventually fueled her own research today.

Kiessling left first-years with a final bit of advice: “Leave time to bond with MIT people.” She encouraged students to seek out a support network, of other students and also faculty.

“Your professors are people that want to share our love of science, engineering, social sciences, humanities, with you, so don’t leave us out of your equation,” Kiessling said. “Take advantage of our enthusiasm to fuel yours.”

Empowering chance

Bryan Bryson invited first-years to be open to unexpected opportunities and encounters.

“For the next four years, envision this entire campus as your classroom,” Bryson said. “Because I guarantee you that there is almost certainly something for you to learn everywhere you turn at MIT.”

Bryson learned this lesson quite literally as an undergraduate, some 19 years ago. He recalled one day being lost in an MIT hallway when a poster caught his eye. When a professor passing by offered to chat with him more about the poster’s subject, he panicked — intimidated and anxious that he didn’t know enough to ask the right questions. But the conversation started on surprisingly even ground, with a common birthplace (the South), shared hobbies, and eventually, research and the poster’s topic.

That chance encounter was empowering for Bryson, and he wound up working in the professor’s lab for the next three years.

“I always look back at that experience as what one of my friends from orientation, Jackie, calls a serendipitous fulcrum in our MIT experience,” he said.

Today, Bryson makes a special effort as a professor to be open and approachable to his students. He does so in his classroom, and in the residence hall where he is an associate head of house.

“In Simmons Hall, where I live, I tell my students my official title is ‘neighbor,’ so feel free to come by and eat some homemade ice cream, or meet our indoor collection of citrus plants,” he said.

Bryson believes that feeling empowered to make new connections and seeing the humanity in others are essential to MIT’s mission of making a better world.

“What connects us, as students, faculty, and staff alike, is the human desire to solve problems both big and small, for each other and the world around us,” Bryson said.

“The magic of MIT is all of you. And it is deeply connected to your humanity.”

In closing, Bryson encouraged the Class of 2026:

“It is my great wish for you that you experience your own moments of serendipity, as you never know where these hallways at MIT can take you,” he said. “So welcome to MIT, and welcome home.”

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AI that can learn the patterns of human language

Human languages are notoriously complex, and linguists have long thought it would be impossible to teach a machine how to analyze speech sounds and word structures in the way human investigators do.

But researchers at MIT, Cornell University, and McGill University have taken a step in this direction. They have demonstrated an artificial intelligence system that can learn the rules and patterns of human languages on its own.

When given words and examples of how those words change to express different grammatical functions (like tense, case, or gender) in one language, this machine-learning model comes up with rules that explain why the forms of those words change. For instance, it might learn that the letter “a” must be added to end of a word to make the masculine form feminine in Serbo-Croatian.

This model can also automatically learn higher-level language patterns that can apply to many languages, enabling it to achieve better results.

The researchers trained and tested the model using problems from linguistics textbooks that featured 58 different languages. Each problem had a set of words and corresponding word-form changes. The model was able to come up with a correct set of rules to describe those word-form changes for 60 percent of the problems.

This system could be used to study language hypotheses and investigate subtle similarities in the way diverse languages transform words. It is especially unique because the system discovers models that can be readily understood by humans, and it acquires these models from small amounts of data, such as a few dozen words. And instead of using one massive dataset for a single task, the system utilizes many small datasets, which is closer to how scientists propose hypotheses — they look at multiple related datasets and come up with models to explain phenomena across those datasets.

“One of the motivations of this work was our desire to study systems that learn models of datasets that is represented in a way that humans can understand. Instead of learning weights, can the model learn expressions or rules? And we wanted to see if we could build this system so it would learn on a whole battery of interrelated datasets, to make the system learn a little bit about how to better model each one,” says Kevin Ellis ’14, PhD ’20, an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University and lead author of the paper.

Joining Ellis on the paper are MIT faculty members Adam Albright, a professor of linguistics; Armando Solar-Lezama, a professor and associate director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and Joshua B. Tenenbaum, the Paul E. Newton Career Development Professor of Cognitive Science and Computation in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a member of CSAIL; as well as senior author

Timothy J. O’Donnell, assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University, and Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.

The research is published today in Nature Communications.

Looking at language 

In their quest to develop an AI system that could automatically learn a model from multiple related datasets, the researchers chose to explore the interaction of phonology (the study of sound patterns) and morphology (the study of word structure).

Data from linguistics textbooks offered an ideal testbed because many languages share core features, and textbook problems showcase specific linguistic phenomena. Textbook problems can also be solved by college students in a fairly straightforward way, but those students typically have prior knowledge about phonology from past lessons they use to reason about new problems.

Ellis, who earned his PhD at MIT and was jointly advised by Tenenbaum and Solar-Lezama, first learned about morphology and phonology in an MIT class co-taught by O’Donnell, who was a postdoc at the time, and Albright.

“Linguists have thought that in order to really understand the rules of a human language, to empathize with what it is that makes the system tick, you have to be human. We wanted to see if we can emulate the kinds of knowledge and reasoning that humans (linguists) bring to the task,” says Albright.

To build a model that could learn a set of rules for assembling words, which is called a grammar, the researchers used a machine-learning technique known as Bayesian Program Learning. With this technique, the model solves a problem by writing a computer program.

In this case, the program is the grammar the model thinks is the most likely explanation of the words and meanings in a linguistics problem. They built the model using Sketch, a popular program synthesizer which was developed at MIT by Solar-Lezama.

But Sketch can take a lot of time to reason about the most likely program. To get around this, the researchers had the model work one piece at a time, writing a small program to explain some data, then writing a larger program that modifies that small program to cover more data, and so on.

They also designed the model so it learns what “good” programs tend to look like. For instance, it might learn some general rules on simple Russian problems that it would apply to a more complex problem in Polish because the languages are similar. This makes it easier for the model to solve the Polish problem.

Tackling textbook problems

When they tested the model using 70 textbook problems, it was able to find a grammar that matched the entire set of words in the problem in 60 percent of cases, and correctly matched most of the word-form changes in 79 percent of problems.

The researchers also tried pre-programming the model with some knowledge it “should” have learned if it was taking a linguistics course, and showed that it could solve all problems better.

“One challenge of this work was figuring out whether what the model was doing was reasonable. This isn’t a situation where there is one number that is the single right answer. There is a range of possible solutions which you might accept as right, close to right, etc.,” Albright says.

The model often came up with unexpected solutions. In one instance, it discovered the expected answer to a Polish language problem, but also another correct answer that exploited a mistake in the textbook. This shows that the model could “debug” linguistics analyses, Ellis says.

The researchers also conducted tests that showed the model was able to learn some general templates of phonological rules that could be applied across all problems.

“One of the things that was most surprising is that we could learn across languages, but it didn’t seem to make a huge difference,” says Ellis. “That suggests two things. Maybe we need better methods for learning across problems. And maybe, if we can’t come up with those methods, this work can help us probe different ideas we have about what knowledge to share across problems.”

In the future, the researchers want to use their model to find unexpected solutions to problems in other domains. They could also apply the technique to more situations where higher-level knowledge can be applied across interrelated datasets. For instance, perhaps they could develop a system to infer differential equations from datasets on the motion of different objects, says Ellis.

“This work shows that we have some methods which can, to some extent, learn inductive biases. But I don’t think we’ve quite figured out, even for these textbook problems, the inductive bias that lets a linguist accept the plausible grammars and reject the ridiculous ones,” he adds.

“This work opens up many exciting venues for future research. I am particularly intrigued by the possibility that the approach explored by Ellis and colleagues (Bayesian Program Learning, BPL) might speak to how infants acquire language,” says T. Florian Jaeger, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and computer science at the University of Rochester, who was not an author of this paper. “Future work might ask, for example, under what additional induction biases (assumptions about universal grammar) the BPL approach can successfully achieve human-like learning behavior on the type of data infants observe during language acquisition. I think it would be fascinating to see whether inductive biases that are even more abstract than those considered by Ellis and his team — such as biases originating in the limits of human information processing (e.g., memory constraints on dependency length or capacity limits in the amount of information that can be processed per time) — would be sufficient to induce some of the patterns observed in human languages.”

This work was funded, in part, by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture, the Canada CIFAR AI Chairs Program, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and an NSF graduate fellowship.

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Deepto Chakrabarty named head of the Department of Physics

Professor Deepto Chakrabarty, principal investigator at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, has been named head of the Department of Physics, effective Aug. 29. Chakrabarty succeeds Peter Fisher, the Thomas A. Frank (1977) Professor of Physics, who has led the department since Nov. 13, 2013.

“Professor Chakrabarty will continue to provide strong leadership in high-energy astrophysics research working with his colleagues in the MIT Kavli Institute, and now, in his role at the head of physics, he will also enable the work of countless others,” says Nergis Mavalvala, the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics and the dean of the MIT School of Science. “As faculty lead of Physics 8.01, a required subject for all MIT undergraduates, over the past decade, Deepto has also has tremendous positive impact on the education of thousands of MIT students.”

“I am deeply honored that I can continue the important work of the department. Peter Fisher’s departmental leadership has been an inspiration” says Chakrabarty, who has been associate department head since 2020 and co-leader of the physics course 8.01, a required subject for all MIT undergraduates, for the past eight years. “And with Dean Mavalvala at the helm of our school, MIT will continue to be the world leader in physics across the spectrum of research areas.”

“Deepto’s research in X-ray astronomy has provided a foundation for the field of high-energy astrophysics,” says Fisher, who will begin his new role as the head of the Office of Research Computing and Data (ORCD) at the start of the year. “As former head of the astrophysics division within MIT and as a leader in current observational astrophysics techniques, Deepto has ensured that generations of past and current astrophysicists have deep and rigorous training. He has also served as associate department head for the last two years and comes well-prepared for his new role.”

Chakrabarty’s primary research interests are the physics and astrophysics of neutron stars. Specifically, he is a leader in the field in understanding millisecond pulsars, a type of fast-spinning neutron star formed in a binary system with an ordinary star. Gas pulled away from the surface of the companion star crashes onto the neutron star, spinning it up to rotation rates of hundreds of revolutions per second and emitting X-ray light in the process.

Physicists like Chakrabarty have shown that oscillations in the emitted X-ray light can be used to measure a pulsar's spin evolution and other key parameters. Such observations originally made with NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer earned Chakrabarty, and colleagues Tod Strohmayer of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Rudy Wijnands of the University of Amsterdam, the Bruno Rossi Prize — the top award given by the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).

Chakrabarty’s current research uses NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an X-ray astronomy instrument aboard the International Space Station built by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the MIT Kavli Institute. Recently, research scientist Dheeraj Pasham along with Chakrabarty, MIT Kavli Institute researchers, and other collaborators outside of MIT used NICER to trace the source of a bright blue cosmic explosion to the birth of a neutron star or black hole. This new evidence of X-ray pulses, every 4.4 milliseconds, over a span of 60 days, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, opens possibilities for finding more nascent black holes or neutron stars promptly in the wake of dying stars.

Chakrabarty completed his BS in physics at MIT in 1988. He subsequently earned his PhD in physics from Caltech in 1996, following two years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a staff physicist working on the Berkeley Automated Supernova Search. After receiving his doctorate, Chakrabarty returned to MIT in 1996 for a three-year postdoc appointment as a NASA Compton GRO Fellow, including a stint as a visiting fellow at Balliol College, Oxford University. In 1999, he became an assistant professor within the Department of Physics and was tenured in 2004.

Chakrabarty is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a legacy fellow of the American Astronomical Society. His other awards include an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Buechner Teaching Prize in Physics, and the inaugural 2017 MITx Prize for Teaching and Learning in MOOCs for his work on the 8.01x Mechanics Series. He recently chaired the panel on “Compact Objects and Energetic Phenomena” of the Astro2020 Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences.

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Microscopy technique reveals hidden nanostructures in cells and tissues

Inside a living cell, proteins and other molecules are often tightly packed together. These dense clusters can be difficult to image because the fluorescent labels used to make them visible can’t wedge themselves in between the molecules.

MIT researchers have now developed a novel way to overcome this limitation and make those “invisible” molecules visible. Their technique allows them to “de-crowd” the molecules by expanding a cell or tissue sample before labeling the molecules, which makes the molecules more accessible to fluorescent tags.

This method, which builds on a widely used technique known as expansion microscopy previously developed at MIT, should allow scientists to visualize molecules and cellular structures that have never been seen before.

“It’s becoming clear that the expansion process will reveal many new biological discoveries. If biologists and clinicians have been studying a protein in the brain or another biological specimen, and they’re labeling it the regular way, they might be missing entire categories of phenomena,” says Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology, a professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Using this technique, Boyden and his colleagues showed that they could image a nanostructure found in the synapses of neurons. They also imaged the structure of Alzheimer’s-linked amyloid beta plaques in greater detail than has been possible before.

“Our technology, which we named expansion revealing, enables visualization of these nanostructures, which previously remained hidden, using hardware easily available in academic labs,” says Deblina Sarkar, an assistant professor in the Media Lab and one of the lead authors of the study.

The senior authors of the study are Boyden; Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory; and Thomas Blanpied, a professor of physiology at the University of Maryland. Other lead authors include Jinyoung Kang, an MIT postdoc, and Asmamaw Wassie, a recent MIT PhD recipient. The study appears today in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

De-crowding

Imaging a specific protein or other molecule inside a cell requires labeling it with a fluorescent tag carried by an antibody that binds to the target. Antibodies are about 10 nanometers long, while typical cellular proteins are usually about 2 to 5 nanometers in diameter, so if the target proteins are too densely packed, the antibodies can’t get to them.

This has been an obstacle to traditional imaging and also to the original version of expansion microscopy, which Boyden first developed in 2015. In the original version of expansion microscopy, researchers attached fluorescent labels to molecules of interest before they expanded the tissue. The labeling was done first, in part because the researchers had to use an enzyme to chop up proteins in the sample so the tissue could be expanded. This meant that the proteins couldn’t be labeled after the tissue was expanded.

To overcome that obstacle, the researchers had to find a way to expand the tissue while leaving the proteins intact. They used heat instead of enzymes to soften the tissue, allowing the tissue to expand 20-fold without being destroyed. Then, the separated proteins could be labeled with fluorescent tags after expansion.

With so many more proteins accessible for labeling, the researchers were able to identify tiny cellular structures within synapses, the connections between neurons that are densely packed with proteins. They labeled and imaged seven different synaptic proteins, which allowed them to visualize, in detail, “nanocolumns” consisting of calcium channels aligned with other synaptic proteins. These nanocolumns, which are believed to help make synaptic communication more efficient, were first discovered by Blanpied’s lab in 2016.

“This technology can be used to answer a lot of biological questions about dysfunction in synaptic proteins, which are involved in neurodegenerative diseases,” Kang says. “Until now there has been no tool to visualize synapses very well.”

New patterns

The researchers also used their new technique to image beta amyloid, a peptide that forms plaques in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Using brain tissue from mice, the researchers found that amyloid beta forms periodic nanoclusters, which had not been seen before. These clusters of amyloid beta also include potassium channels. The researchers also found amyloid beta molecules that formed helical structures along axons.

“In this paper, we don’t speculate as to what that biology might mean, but we show that it exists. That is just one example of the new patterns that we can see,” says Margaret Schroeder, an MIT graduate student who is also an author of the paper.

Sarkar says that she is fascinated by the nanoscale biomolecular patterns that this technology unveils. “With a background in nanoelectronics, I have developed electronic chips that require extremely precise alignment, in the nanofab. But when I see that in our brain Mother Nature has arranged biomolecules with such nanoscale precision, that really blows my mind,” she says.

Boyden and his group members are now working with other labs to study cellular structures such as protein aggregates linked to Parkinson’s and other diseases. In other projects, they are studying pathogens that infect cells and molecules that are involved in aging in the brain. Preliminary results from these studies have also revealed novel structures, Boyden says.

“Time and time again, you see things that are truly shocking,” he says. “It shows us how much we are missing with classical unexpanded staining.”

The researchers are also working on modifying the technique so they can image up to 20 proteins at a time. They are also working on adapting their process so that it can be used on human tissue samples.

Sarkar and her team, on the other hand, are developing tiny wirelessly powered nanoelectronic devices which could be distributed in the brain. They plan to integrate these devices with expansion revealing. “This can combine the intelligence of nanoelectronics with the nanoscopy prowess of expansion technology, for an integrated functional and structural understanding of the brain,” Sarkar says.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Ludwig Family Foundation, the JPB Foundation, the Open Philanthropy Project, John Doerr, Lisa Yang and the Tan-Yang Center for Autism Research at MIT, the U.S. Army Research Office, Charles Hieken, Tom Stocky, Kathleen Octavio, Lore McGovern, Good Ventures, and HHMI.

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Tipping the balance between global rivals

John David Minnich was under the spell of political philosophy until he took a trip across a bridge in China. The doctoral student in political science vividly recalls this life-changing 2009 journey, undertaken as part of a summer research fellowship program. 

“Driving in from the airport, I was overwhelmed by my first glimpse of the Shanghai skyline — a scene of insane activity,” he says. “I realized I was witnessing the future and that I’d have to understand what was happening here to know where the world was going.” The experience was so powerful, adds Minnich, “that 15 years later, I’m still driven by it.”

In his nearly-complete dissertation, Minnich explores how China’s strategic use of trade and foreign investment policy to bring about large-scale transfers of foreign technology helped power that nation’s rapid economic ascent.

“The U.S. and China are in the midst of a possible power transition,” says Minnich. “I want to understand how old great powers fall, and how new powers rise.”

Minnich’s studies shed light on the mechanics behind these tectonic shifts in global might.

“In the current era, rapid technological change, the globalization of production, capital flows, and technology drive rates of growth,” he says. “Policies to harness these forces, such as those made by China, are crucial to explaining how one country becomes a superpower, while others lag behind.”

Tech transfer and trade war

In 2018, Trump administration policies that amounted to a new trade war with China provided an impetus for Minnich’s doctoral research. “This war led to the deterioration of U.S.-China relations and a breakdown of communication, with life-and-death implications,” says Minnich. He was particularly interested in the punitive tariffs the U.S. government levied on specific Chinese industries, justified primarily on the grounds of what the administration called forced technological transfer and intellectual property theft.

“There was clearly an incredible process of China going from technologically backward to being a tech powerhouse, and out-competing us in many critical industries,” says Minnich. “There had been no effort to go out and systematically document how China used technology transfer policies in a strategic way, so that’s what I set out to do.”

China has a well-established practice of demanding that foreign firms doing business there form joint ventures with domestic companies and share technology, says Minnich. But he wondered if there was any variation by industry to this convention. So in the first phase of his dissertation research, he created a dataset showing “what policies were in place for a given industry, in a given year,” drawing from hundreds of pages of Chinese central government policy documents. This singular dataset revealed some puzzling variations in the application of policy.

Strong evidence of foreign technology transfer regulations showed up in a cluster of “objectively strategically important industries.” But in a strange twist, in the semiconductor industry, critical to China’s and the world’s economy, the same rules did not apply. The explanation for this policy exception, believes Minnich, derives from China’s position in global supply chains.

In those industries where China imports products and provides a domestic consumer base, it has the greatest leverage on foreign companies and strenuously applies technology extraction policies. Some examples Minnich cites: civilian aircraft, automotive, high-speed rail, and wind turbine manufacturing. But in industries where most of what China imports it simply processes locally for re-export to consumer markets overseas — such as semiconductors, until recently — it has less leverage. “China is dependent on foreign firms, which not only directly employ millions of people in China, but also act as gatekeepers to international trade,” he says.

From revolutionary history to policy

Minnich’s journey to China began, unexpectedly, with his involvement in experimental theater. Raised in Austin, Texas, by politically progressive parents, he discovered a penchant for the stage in fifth grade; by high school he was starring in regional productions. Inspired by the essays of playwright Bertholt Brecht, Minnich became immersed in political philosophy. This led to a summer program, and at Cornell University, an undergraduate focus, on critical theory and revolutionary history.

“Then with the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China was on the map,” he recalls. “If I was seriously interested in the global history of revolutions, I had to look at the Chinese revolution.” He crossed the bridge into China studies. “I’d spent two years acquiring powerful theoretical tools for understanding the past, but I realized that what I was witnessing would transform the way the world works.”

Minnich left Cornell with a degree in history and Asian studies, then spent two years in China immersing himself in Mandarin. On his return, he worked as an Asia-Pacific analyst for Stratfor, a platform for geopolitical risk analysis. “My primary responsibility was Chinese political economy and U.S.-China relations,” he says. “It trained me to do big-picture theorizing on how states behave, and to develop a deep understanding of different industries.”

Certain he wanted to become a China scholar, Minnich headed for MIT. “Since that moment in Shanghai 14 years ago, just one thing has driven me: the reasons behind China’s rise, and its potential consequences.”

Research as resource

With advisors M. Taylor Fravel, In Song Kim, Richard Samuels, and Jonathan Kirshner, Minnich fleshed out an ambitious program of research that challenges the conventional understanding of the ways states advance their political goals through trade policy. Many researchers assign a major role to interest groups, he says. “But you can’t understand China’s trade policy without considering the Chinese Communist Party’s strategic goals to speed up the country’s rise,” he says.

Minnich believes his findings will prove useful. “A greater grasp of where China does or doesn’t apply trade rules and industrial policies will leave policymakers better equipped to develop effective responses,” he says. Minnich adds that he has found evidence that developing countries are beginning to employ tactics pioneered by China to secure technology transfers.

He also wants to sound an alarm about the long-term consequences of the U.S.-China trade war. “It is eroding cultural and educational exchange between the countries, and affecting the U.S. business community’s view of China in a potentially dangerous way,” he says.

Extending his dissertation research, Minnich is currently building a comprehensive database on Chinese industrial and technology policies from 1978 to the present, which he will make publicly available once completed. Funded by the National Science Foundation and American Political Science Association, the database will encompass more than 60,000 Chinese-language policy documents. “I’m creating this so future China scholars can probe a huge number of questions,” he says.

Minnich’s next task is to turn his thesis into a book on how China regulates inflows of goods and capital in order to secure foreign technology transfers. At the same time, he is also planning his next project, which will investigate China’s evolving efforts to shape its strategic environment. “Ultimately, this will build towards a much bigger work: an overview of the entire process of China’s rise,” says Minnich.

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Tech in translation

The Sony Walkman and virtual reality headsets are not just prominent examples of personal technology. In the hands of Paul Roquet, they’re also vehicles for learning more about Japan, the U.S., global technology trends — and ourselves.

Roquet is an associate professor in MIT’s program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing, and his forte is analyzing how new consumer technologies change the way people interact with their environments. His focus in this effort has been Japan, an early adopter of many postwar trends in personal tech.

For instance, in his 2016 book “Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self” (University of Minnesota Press), Roquet examines how music, film, and other media have been deployed in Japan to create soothing, relaxing individual atmospheres for people. That gives people a feeling of control, even though their moods are now mediated by the products they consume.

In his 2022 book, “The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan” (Columbia University Press), Roquet explored the impact of VR technologies on users, understanding these devices as tools for both closing off the outside world and interacting with others in networked settings. Roquet also detailed the cross-cultural trajectories of VR, which in the U.S. emerged out of military and aviation applications, but in Japan has been centered around forms of escapist entertainment.

As Roquet puts it, his work is steadily focused on “the relationship between media technologies and environmental perception, and how this relationship plays out differently in different cultural contexts.”

He adds: “There’s a lot to be gained by trying to think through the same questions in different parts of the world.”

Those different cultures are connected, to be sure: In Japan, for example, the English musician Brian Eno was a significant influence in the understanding of ambient media. The translation of VR technologies from the U.S. to Japan happened, in part, via technologists and innovators with MIT links. Meanwhile, Japan gave the world the Sony Walkman, a sonic enclosure of its own. 

As such, Roquet’s work is innovative, pulling together cultural trends across different media and tracing them around the globe, through the history, present, and future of technology. For his research and teaching, Roquet was granted tenure at MIT earlier this year.

Exchange program pays off

Roquet grew up in California, where his family moved around to a few different towns while he was a kid. As a high school student learning Japanese in Davis, he enrolled in an exchange program with Japan, the California-Japan Scholars program, enabling him to see the country up close. It was the first time Roquet had been outside of the U.S., and the trip had a lasting impact.

Roquet kept studying Japanese language and culture while an undergraduate at Pomona College; he earned his BA in 2003, in Asian studies and media studies. Roquet also indulged his growing fascination with atmospheric media by hosting a college radio show featuring often-experimental forms of ambient music. Soon Roquet discovered, to his bemusement, that his show was being played — with unknown effects on customers — at a local car dealership.

Japanese film was still another source of Roquet’s emergent intellectual interests, due to the differences he perceived with mainstream U.S. cinema.

“The storytelling would often function very differently,” Roquet says. “I found myself drawn to films where there was less of an emphasis on plot, and more emphasis on atmosphere and space.”

After college, Roquet won a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and immediately spent a year on an ambitious research project, investigating what the local soundscape meant to residents across the Asia-Pacific region — including Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, the Cook Islands — as well as Canada.

“It made me aware of how different people’s relationship to the soundscape can be from one place to another, and how history, politics, and culture shape the sensory environment,” Roquet says.

He then earned his MA in 2007 from the University of California at Berkeley, and ultimately his PhD from Berkeley in 2012, with a focus on Japan Studies and a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies. His dissertation formed the basis of his “Ambient Media” book.

Following three years as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, at Stanford University, and one as a postdoc in global media at Brown University, Roquet joined the MIT faculty in 2016. He has remained at the Institute since, producing his second book, as well as a range of essays on VR and other forms of environmental media.

Willingness to explore

MIT has been an excellent fit, Roquet says, given his varied interests in the relationship between technology and culture.

“One thing I love about MIT is there’s a real willingness to explore newly emerging ideas and practices, even if they may not be situated in an established disciplinary context yet,” Roquet says. “MIT allows that interdisciplinary conversation to take place because you have this location that ties everything together.”

Roquet has also taught a wide range of undergraduate classes, including introductions to media studies and to Japanese culture; a course on Japanese and Korean cinema; another on Japanese literature and cinema; and a course on digital media in Japan and Korea. This semester he is teaching a new course on critical approaches to immersive media studies. 

Of MIT’s undergraduates, Roquet notes, “They have a remarkable range of interests, and this means class discussions shift from year to year in really interesting ways.

Whatever sparks their curiosity, they are always ready to dig deep.”

When it comes to his ongoing research, Roquet is exploring how the increasing use of immersive media works to transform a society’s relationship with the existing physical landscape.

“These kinds of questions are not asked nearly enough,” Roquet says. “There’s a lot of emphasis on what virtual spaces offer to the consumer, but there are always  environmental and social impacts created by inserting new layers of mediation between a person and their surrounding world. Not to mention by manufacturing headsets that often become obsolete within a couple years.”

Wherever his work takes him, Roquet will still be engaging in a career-long project of exploring the cultural and historical differences among countries in order to expand our understanding of media and technology.

“I don’t want to make the argument that Japan is radically different from the U.S. These histories are very intertwined, and there’s a lot of back and forth [between the countries],” Roquet says. “But also, when you pay close attention to local contexts you can uncover critical differences in how media technologies are understood and put to use. These can teach us a lot, and challenge our assumptions.”

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MIT’s solar car team wins 2022 American Solar Challenge for the second year in a row

Many feel a lift when the sun comes out, but most won’t break out in song and dance — unless, of course, they’re on MIT’s Solar Electric Vehicle Team. 

The team relied on 100 percent solar energy to power their hand-built car, Nimbus, for 1,940 miles, taking first place at the American Solar Challenge for the second year in a row in the Single Occupant Vehicle category. 

“We were a little nervous about how this race was going to go because last year was quite difficult,” SEVT captain and MIT senior Cameron Kokesh shares. “This year we planned more decisions ahead of time and it was much more enjoyable.”

To qualify for The American Solar Challenge, teams go through a rigorous week of challenges called “scrutineering” and the Formula Sun Grand Prix, a three-day track race. These events ensure that teams can safely complete the eight-day trek from Independence, Missouri to Twin Falls, Idaho. No longer enjoying the predictability of the track, teams must deal with changes in elevation, road conditions, and driving laws. 

In typical MIT fashion, the SEVT strategy team designed software to measure these variables and determine the best speed to travel. “The most recent iteration took all of last year to develop,” strategy lead MIT junior Stephen Campbell says. “Our philosophy with the new version was to develop tools to assist the people making strategic calls. This proved to be quite flexible during the race, allowing us to adapt our target speeds based on our distance goals and the changing weather conditions.” The strategy team drove alongside Nimbus in a chase vehicle, calling out target speeds every time the software downloaded new data. 

The strategy team made every decision in secret, because if other teams overheard their plans, they could adjust their own plans to get ahead.

“They wouldn’t even tell me how much charge their battery had,” says Patrick McAtamney, the Edgerton Center technical instructor and shop manager. “Stephen’s parents were camping out with us, and he wouldn’t tell them either!”

“Maybe we took it a little overboard with the secrecy,” Stephen laughs. “We would flip the box over so other teams couldn’t see the number on it. If you know how much battery the other teams have, you can make decisions based on that.”

Surviving the heat 

This year’s race took place during a heat wave, with many 100-degree days. To perform at their best and avoid accidents, the team had to monitor one another’s hydration, sleep, stress level, and temperature. 

“On the first night we arrived at the track in Kansas, there was an enormous rush to get the car ready for inspection the next morning, and the electrical team had to stay up and work for the full night,” sophomore Vice Captain Maria Aguiar says. “The next morning, the rest of the team insisted that these people sleep during the busy day to recover, even if they said they could continue working that day.”

“Any time that seemed to be lost resting in air conditioning or sleeping more was certainly outweighed by the clearer minds and efficiency we had during the more intense situations,” Aguiar explains. “No one ever glorified a sleepless night or urged an exhausted teammate to keep working. A member could confide in anyone, and help would come immediately. This level of selflessness from the team was something magical.”

Despite the stress of the heat and the race, the team made sure everyone kept their spirits high and had fun. They enjoyed composing songs and singing them for other teams. They sang a parody of “California Girls” to the University of California at Berkley team, which led to instant friendship. “We became best friends with so many teams,” Aguiar recounts. They also made a solar car theme song and sang it to the race officials. 

Here comes the sun

On day six of eight, SEVT camped overnight between the border signs of Wyoming and Idaho after completing an extra loop. Principia College, camped just a few yards away, was in a close second to their first. But with a cloudy forecast, a 4 percent charge on their car battery, and a 7,412-foot climb up South Pass ahead, they feared they might lose it all. 

“We were really concerned we wouldn’t be able to make it,” says Campbell. Campbell and the rest of the strategy team anxiously refreshed their weather apps, hoping for some good news.

“We all knew that the end of the race would be determined by the next few actions we took,” says Kokesh.

The next day they were allowed to leave at 9 a.m. “We decided to charge our car until 10:30 and Principia left around 9:15 to try to get some miles ahead. It had been cloudy all night. A few minutes after Principia left, the sun came out. We were able to put our array facing directly into the sun and get the charge we needed to climb the mountain. We were able to make it to the next checkpoint driving at 30-40 mph the entire way there,” Campbell says. 

SEVT won with a 73.4-mile lead. They were also recognized with the Battery Pack Award and Sportsmanship Award.

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Promoting systemic change in the Middle East, the “MIT way”

The Middle East is a region that is facing complicated challenges. MIT programs have been committed to building scalable methodologies through which students and the broader MIT community can learn and make an impact. These processes ensure programs work alongside others across cultures to support change aligned with their needs. Through MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), faculty and staff at the Institute continue to build opportunities to connect with and support the region.

In this spirit, MISTI launched the Leaders Journey Workshop in 2021. This program partnered MIT students with Palestinian and Israeli alumni from three associate organizations: Middle East Entrepreneurs for Tomorrow (MEET), Our Generation Speaks (OGS), and Tech2Peace. Teams met monthly to engage with speakers and work with one another to explore the best ways to leverage science, technology, and entrepreneurship across borders.

Building on the success of this workshop, the program piloted a for-credit course: SP.258 (MISTI: Middle East Cross-Border Development and Leadership) in fall 2021. The course involved engaging with subject matter experts through five mini-consulting projects in collaboration with regional stakeholders. Topics included climate, health care, and economic development. The course was co-instructed by associate director of the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program (REAP) Sinan AbuShanab, managing director of MISTI programs in the Middle East David Dolev, and Kathleen Schwind '19, with MIT CIS/ MISTI Research Affiliate Steven Koltai as lead mentor. The course also drew support from alumni mentors and regional industry partners.

The course was developed during the height of the pandemic and thus successfully leveraged the intense culture of online engagement prevalent at the time by layering in-person coursework with strategic digital group engagement. Pedagogically, the structure was inspired by multiple MIT methodologies: MISTI preparation and training courses, Sloan Action Learning, REAP/REAL multi-party stakeholder model, the Media Lab Learning Initiative, and the multicultural framework of associate organizations.

“We worked to develop a series of aims and a methodology that would enrich MIT students and their peers in the region and support the important efforts of Israelis and Palestinians to make systemic change,” said Dolev.

During the on-campus sessions, MIT students explored the region's political and historical complexities and the meaning of being a global leader and entrepreneur. Guest presenters included: Boston College Associate Professor Peter Krause (MIT Security Studies Program alumnus), Gilad Rosenzweig (MITdesignX), Ari Jacobovits (MIT-Africa), and Mollie Laffin-Rose Agbiboa (MIT-REAP). Group projects focused on topics that fell under three key regional verticals: water, health care, and economic development. The teams were given a technical or business challenge they were tasked with solving. These challenges were sourced directly from for-profit and nonprofit organizations in the region.

“This was a unique opportunity for me to learn so much about the area I live in, work on a project together with people from the ‘other side,’ MIT students, and incredible mentors,” shared a participant from the region. “Furthermore, getting a glimpse of the world of MIT was a great experience for me.”

For their final presentations, teams pitched their solutions, including their methodology for researching/addressing the problem, a description of solutions to be applied, what is needed to execute the idea itself, and potential challenges encountered. Teams received feedback and continued to deepen their experience in cross-cultural teamwork.

"As an education manager, I needed guidance with these digital tools and how to approach them," says an EcoPeace representative. "The MIT program provided me with clear deliverables I can now implement in my team's work."

"This course has broadened my knowledge of conflicts, relationships, and how geography plays an important role in the region,” says an MIT student participant. “Moving forward, I feel more confident working with business and organizations to develop solutions for problems in real time, using the skills I have to supplement the project work.”

Layers of engagement with mentors, facilitators, and whole-team leadership ensured that participants gained project management experience, learning objectives were met, and professional development opportunities were available. Each team was assigned an MIT-MEET alumni mentor with whom they met throughout the course. Mentors coached the teams on methods for managing a client project and how to collaborate for successful completion. Joint sessions with MIT guest speakers deepened participants' regional understanding of water, health care, economic development, and their importance in the region. Speakers included: Mohamed Aburawi, Phil Budden (MIT-REAP) Steven Koltai, Shari Loessberg, Dina Sherif (MIT Legatum Center, Greg Sixt (J-WAFS), and Shriya Srinivasan.

“The program is unlike any other I've come across,” says one of the alumni mentors. “The chance for MIT students to work directly with peers from the region, to propose and create technical solutions to real problems on the ground, and partner with local organizations is an incredibly meaningful opportunity. I wish I had been able to participate in something like this when I was at MIT.”

Each team also assigned a fellow group member as a facilitator, who served as the main point of contact for the team and oversaw project management: organizing workstreams, ensuring deadlines were met, and mediating any group disagreements. This model led to successful project outcomes and innovative suggestions.

"The superb work of the MISTI group gave us a critical eye and made significant headway on a product that can hopefully be a game changer to over 150 Israeli and Palestinian organizations," says a representative from Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP).

Leadership team meetings included MIT staff and Israeli and Palestinian leadership of the partner organizations for discussing process, content, recent geopolitical developments, and how to adapt the class to the ongoing changing situation.

“The topic of Palestine/Israel is contentious: globally, in the region, and also, at times, on the MIT campus,” says Dolev. “I myself have questioned how we can make a systemic impact with our partners from the region. How can we be side-by-side on that journey for the betterment of all? I have now seen first-hand how this multilayered model can work.”

MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) is MIT's hub for global experiences. MISTI's unparalleled internship, research, teaching, and study abroad programs offer students unique experiences that bring MIT's one-of-a-kind education model to life in countries around the world. MISTI programs are carefully designed to complement on-campus course work and research, and rigorous, country-specific preparation enables students to forge cultural connections and play a role in addressing important global challenges while abroad. Students come away from their experiences with invaluable perspectives that inform their education, career, and worldview. MISTI embodies MIT's commitment to global engagement and prepares students to thrive in an increasingly interconnected world.

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Assay determines the percentage of Omicron, other variants in Covid wastewater

Wastewater monitoring emerged amid the Covid-19 pandemic as an effective and noninvasive way to track a viral outbreak, and advances in the technology have enabled researchers to not only identify but also quantify the presence of particular variants of concern (VOCs) in wastewater samples.

Last year, researchers with the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) made the news for developing a quantitative assay for the Alpha variant of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater, while also working on a similar assay for the Delta variant. Previously, conventional wastewater detection methods could only detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2 viral material in a sample, without identifying the variant of the virus.

Now, a team at SMART has developed a quantitative RT-qPCR assay that can detect the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. This type of assay enables wastewater surveillance to accurately trace variant dynamics in any given community or population, and support and inform the implementation of appropriate public health measures tailored according to the specific traits of a particular viral pathogen.

The capacity to count and assess particular VOCs is unique to SMART’s open-source assay, and allows researchers to accurately determine displacement trends in a community. Hence, the new assay can reveal what proportion of SARS-CoV-2 virus circulating in a community belongs to a particular variant. This is particularly significant, as different SARS-CoV-2 VOCs — Alpha, Delta, Omicron, and their offshoots — have emerged at various points throughout the pandemic, each causing a new wave of infections to which the population was more susceptible.

The team's new allele-specific RT-qPCR assay is described in a paper, “Rapid displacement of SARS-CoV-2 variant Delta by Omicron revealed by allele-specific PCR in wastewater,” published this month in Water Research. Senior author on the work is Eric Alm, professor of biological engineering at MIT and a principal investigator in the Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) interdisciplinary research group within SMART, MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore. Co-authors include researchers from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore National University (NUS), MIT, Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE), and Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale della Lombardia e dell'Emilia Romagna (IZSLER) in Italy.

Omicron overtakes delta within three weeks in Italy study

In their study, SMART researchers found that the increase in booster vaccine population coverage in Italy concurred with the complete displacement of the Delta variant by the Omicron variant in wastewater samples obtained from the Torbole Casaglia wastewater treatment plant, with a catchment size of 62,722 people. Taking less than three weeks, the rapid pace of this displacement can be attributed to Omicron’s infection advantage over the previously dominant Delta in vaccinated individuals, which may stem from Omicron’s more efficient evasion of vaccination-induced immunity.

“In a world where Covid-19 is endemic, the monitoring of VOCs through wastewater surveillance will be an effective tool for the tracking of variants circulating in the community and will play an increasingly important role in guiding public health response,” says paper co-author Federica Armas, a senior postdoc at SMART AMR. “This work has demonstrated that wastewater surveillance can be used to quickly and quantitatively trace VOCs present in a community.”

Wastewater surveillance vital for future pandemic responses

As the global population becomes increasingly vaccinated and exposed to prior infections, nations have begun transitioning toward the classification of SARS-CoV-2 as an endemic disease, rolling back active clinical surveillance toward decentralized antigen rapid tests, and consequently reducing sequencing of patient samples. However, SARS-CoV-2 has been shown to produce novel VOCs that can swiftly emerge and spread rapidly across populations, displacing previously dominant variants of the virus. This was observed when Delta displaced Alpha across the globe after the former’s emergence in India in December 2020, and again when Omicron displaced Delta at an even faster rate following its discovery in South Africa in November 2021. The continuing emergence of novel VOCs therefore necessitates continued vigilance on the monitoring of circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants in communities.

In a separate review paper on wastewater surveillance titled “Making Waves: Wastewater Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in an Endemic Future,” published in the journal Water Research, SMART researchers and collaborators found that the utility of wastewater surveillance in the near future could include 1) monitoring the trend of viral loads in wastewater for quantified viral estimates circulating in a community; 2) sampling of wastewater at the source — e.g., taking samples from particular neighborhoods or buildings — for pinpointing infections in neighborhoods and at the building level; 3) integrating wastewater and clinical surveillance for cost-efficient population surveillance; and 4) genome sequencing wastewater samples to track circulating and emerging variants in the population.

“Our experience with SARS-CoV-2 has shown that clinical testing can often only paint a limited picture of the true extent of an outbreak or pandemic. With Covid-19 becoming prevalent and with the anticipated emergence of further variants of concern, qualitative and quantitative data from wastewater surveillance will be an integral component of a cost- and resource-efficient public health surveillance program, empowering authorities to make more informed policy decisions,” adds corresponding author Janelle Thompson, associate professor at SCELSE and NTU. “Our review provides a roadmap for the wider deployment of wastewater surveillance, with opportunities and challenges that, if addressed, will enable us to not only better manage Covid-19, but also future-proof societies for other viral pathogens and future pandemics.”

In addition, the review suggests that future wastewater research should comply with a set of standardized wastewater processing methods to reduce inconsistencies in wastewater data toward improving epidemiological inference. Methods developed in the context of SARS-CoV-2 and its analyses could be of invaluable benefit for future wastewater monitoring work on discovering emerging zoonotic pathogens — pathogens that can be transmitted from animals to humans — and for early detection of future pandemics.

Furthermore, far from being confined to SARS-CoV-2, wastewater surveillance has already been adapted for use in combating other viral pathogens. Another paper from September 2021 described an advance in the development of effective wastewater surveillance for dengue, Zika, and yellow fever viruses, with SMART researchers successfully measuring decay rates of these medically significant arboviruses in wastewater. This was followed by another review paper by SMART published in July 2022 that explored current progress and future challenges and opportunities in wastewater surveillance for arboviruses. These developments represent an important first step toward establishing arbovirus wastewater surveillance, which would help policymakers in Singapore and beyond make better informed and more targeted public health measures in controlling arbovirus outbreaks such as dengue, which is a significant public health concern in Singapore.

“Our learnings from using wastewater surveillance as a key tool over the course of Covid-19 will be crucial in helping researchers develop similar methods to monitor and tackle other viral pathogens and future pandemics,” says Lee Wei Lin, first author of the latest SMART paper and research scientist at SMART AMR. “Wastewater surveillance has already shown promising utility in helping to fight other viral pathogens, including some of the world’s most prevalent mosquito-borne diseases, and there is significant potential for the technology to be adapted for use against other infectious viral diseases.”

The research is carried out by SMART and its collaborators at SCELSE, NTU, and NUS, co-led by Professor Eric Alm (SMART and MIT) and Associate Professor Janelle Thompson (SCELSE and NTU), and is supported by Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF) under its Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise (CREATE) program. The research is part of an initiative funded by the NRF to develop sewage-based surveillance for rapid outbreak detection and intervention in Singapore.

SMART was established by MIT in partnership with the NRF in 2007. SMART is the first entity in CREATE developed by NRF and serves as an intellectual and innovation hub for research interactions between MIT and Singapore, undertaking cutting-edge research projects in areas of interest to both Singapore and MIT. SMART currently comprises an Innovation Centre and five interdisciplinary research groups: AMR, Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine, Disruptive & Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision, Future Urban Mobility, and Low Energy Electronic Systems.

The AMR IRG is a translational research and entrepreneurship program that tackles the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance. By leveraging talent and convergent technologies across Singapore and MIT, they tackle AMR head-on by developing multiple innovative and disruptive approaches to identify, respond to, and treat drug-resistant microbial infections. Through strong scientific and clinical collaborations, our goal is to provide transformative, holistic solutions for Singapore and the world.

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